UK GAS-Winter prices rise on extended gas injection outage at Rough storage site

LONDON, April 12 (Reuters) - British winter gas prices rose on Wednesday morning after Centrica (Frankfurt: A0DK6K - news) , Britain's largest gas storage facility operator, announced its Rough site will not be available for gas injections until at least the end of April next year. * Winter 2017 contract rose by 0.62 pence to 46.57 pence per therm at 0912 GMT. * Winter 2018 contract up 0.23 pence at 46.40 p/therm. * Centrica Storage Limited said Rough cannot safely restart injection operations in the 2017/18 storage year after different potential issues in a number of the wells. * The UK gas storage year runs from the start of May to the end of April. * "Curve prices are definitely up on Centrica and also bullish oil," a UK gas trader said. * The within-day contract rose by 0.45 pence to 38.45 p/therm. * However, the system was oversupplied by around 12 million cubic metres (mcm). Demand is forecast at 231.7 mcm and flows at 243.9 mcm/day, National Grid (LSE: NG.L - news) data shows. * Gas flows from Norway were 5 mcm higher at 335 mcm, as flows through the Langeled pipeline grew by 4 mcm compared to Tuesday. * Britain's Met Office forecast temperatures could reach as high as 15 degrees Celsius in the southeast of the country on Wednesday, but are expected to fall slightly to 12 degrees C on Thursday. * Peak wind power output is forecast at 7.7 gigawatts (GW), falling to 6.7 GW on Thursday, National Grid data shows. * In the Dutch gas market, day-ahead gas price at the TTF hub was up 0.05 euro at 15.70 euros per megawatt hour. * Benchmark Dec-17 EU carbon contract inched up by 0.03 euro to 4.90 euros per tonne. * Thomson Reuters (Dusseldorf: TOC.DU - news) analyst view: http://emea1.apps.cp.extranet.thomsonreuters.biz/cms/?pageid=united-kingdom-gas (Reporting by Lefteris Karagiannopoulos; editing by Nina Chestney)